Tag: biology

Black smokers

Deep beneath the oceans, continental plates grind together. Sea water seeps into the ocean floor, contacts superheated rock and roars back out through hydrothermal vents. Surrounding those vents, darkness, pressure, poison gas and heavy metal, acidity and temperatures ranging from freezing to hot enough to melt lead create a zone that would instantly kill most …

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Crickets in space

One of my favorite sketches on the original Muppet Show as “Pigs in Space,” in which the intrepid crew of the starship Swine Trek faced danger, excitement and bad writing while exploring the final frontier. As far as I know, no real pigs have yet flown into space, but many other animals have made the …

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Cockroaches

Steven Spielberg missed a bet with his movie, Jurassic Park. He focused on the age of dinosaurs. If he really wanted to freak people out, he’d focus on a much earlier era, the Carboniferous Period: a.k.a. “The Age of Cockroaches.” Yes, cockroaches, those scuttling, light-fearing pests we’ve all encountered at one time or another, were once …

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Pumpkins

Maybe it’s their cheerful orange color or their round, sort of huggable shape, but people love pumpkins. And this is the time of year when pumpkins really come into their own. In mid-October we’re eating them in pies, and by the end we’re carving them into jack-o-lanterns. All the fruits we call pumpkins belong to …

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Skunks

  There are lots of good things to smell in the summertime: flowers, steaks on the barbecue, fresh-cut grass. But there are also other, less fortunate smells: hot wet dog, five-day-old roadkill–and skunk. My personal experience of the smell of skunk has been limited to a whiff of that inimitable scent wafted on the breeze, …

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Citrus fruits

Never mind carols in the snow, decorated trees and Canadian Tire commercials, for me the real proof Christmas is just around the corner is the appearance of boxes of mandarin oranges. Equating citrus fruit with anything wintry, though, is really rather odd, because citrus fruits are notoriously unsuited for cold climates. Citrus fruits come from …

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Weeds

When I was a kid, I thought dandelions were cool, from their delightful yellow flowers that broke up the monotony of green lawns to their puffballs of parachute-wearing seeds which were so much fun to blow into the neighbor’s grass. Now that I’m grown up, however…well, actually, I still think dandelions are cool, but those …

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Rabbits

This is the time of year when the Easter bunny hops throughout the land, distributing eggs to children (he silliest bit of folklore-cum-advertising gimmick I’ve ever heard, but we seem to be stuck with it). What better topic for a column, then, than rabbits?–which, as anyone who has read Watership Down can tell you, are …

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Roses

Valentine’s Day, just past, might just as well be called Rose Day, so popular is that particular flower that day. But few people reflect, as they give or receive these beautiful blooms, on the science associated with them. Allow me to rectify that oversight. The term “rose” is applied to flowering plants that are members …

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Algae

They lurk in the water. They look harmless. But sometimes–not always, but sometimes–they can cause sickness: even death. “They” are blue-green algae, and it’s a bit startling to think that algae, something we think of, when we think of them at all, as an unsightly but harmless scum, can be toxic–because most algae, most of …

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Fatigue

The Grey Cup in Regina is over. You could tell the day after the game by the number of people wandering around with dazed expressions and bags under their eyes…which inspired me to write this week about two souvenirs of the festivities almost everyone picked up: fatigue and/or a hangover. Fatigue is characterized by an …

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Blood

Vampires are popular right now. There have been more vampire books, movies and TV series than you could shake a cross at in the past few years. Vampires, of course, have a number of unfortunate personality quirks–invisible in mirrors, can’t abide crosses, don’t like the sun–but we’d be willing to overlook all that if not …

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